Oft-asked annoying questions: Why do dominant women date dominant men? Why might dominant women prefer the challenge of forcing non-submissive men to submit? I’m sure Axe, our favorite New York City submissive looking for love, has posted a few times on these topics.

I sigh a bit at both questions. My New Years resolution was twofold: to stop dating dominant men and start eating more vegetables. I’ve been falling down on both counts. This is how I know beating someone who has to be talked into it is not better. It’s just frustrating.

I can’t speculate why dominant women do anything, in part because there’s always some new reason for me to be excluded from both categories proper, but also because I can’t speculate why women, or dominants, do anything. We’re people, right? We do many different things for many different motivations. We need to be taken individually rather than sorted by the often-irrelevant categories of gender and sexual orientation.

Also, there’s the conflation of “sexually dominant” with a certain personality. We should know by now that sexual proclivities aren’t visible or predictable. Freaks don’t exactly fluoresce under blacklight, or have black-PVC-colored auras.

So I can’t answer anything starting with “why do dominant women…”? In the list of Stupid Games People Play, I categorize these somewhere between questions like “Why do women like assholes instead of nice guys?” and “What’s the secret to picking up women?”*

Currently I’m seeing a not-yet-pseudonymic man of many sexual talents. He’s disturbingly handsome — like a cross between Sylar and Dexter — and fucks like a man possessed. He never asks me to wear high heels. He listens when I babble on about sex work and my feminist issues. He’s selflessly dedicated to correcting the karmic imbalance I create by strapping on at work. See … lots to love.

But the not-yet-pseudonymic man wanted to borrow a whip from me, and I wasn’t too keen on participating in my own demise. I agreed to bring it over if he would let me show him what it felt like.

He agreed on the condition that I’d dress up for him. Jesus. Maybe this is the difference in beating dominant men: you pay them for the privilege.

Eventually I remembered to bring the whip on Friday night. And as agreed, he stripped off his shirt, leaned his hands on the wall, and turned his well-muscled back to me.

Guh! Words! I fail.

Somehow in two months of sex with this man, this is not a sight I had been presented. I don’t know how to describe my reaction except in fetishistic terms. Jeans, BDUs, and/or tight white boxerbriefs are optional in this scenario — but highly recommended. That pose is just iconic. It makes me hyperventilate the way someone else might get woogly about men on their knees.

Remember the whipping scene from Starship Troopers? Yeah, yeah, laugh all you like, but that scene was fucking hot.

Cautiously I started to snap the whip. (My aim is decent, but to share a secret, I am significantly vision-impaired. I have to use physical cheats to gauge distance. Those warm-up strokes? Not for you.)

There, it was brushing his skin. Thin red welts began to rise across his beautiful back.

“God, you mark up pretty,” I said. Then, remembering myself: “How does that feel?”

He replied, noncommittal.

I hit him harder. Sadly, he didn’t so much as grunt, but that was what I had expected. Men tend to be disappointingly stoic; ones who style themselves as not-submissive, more so. And pain is much less distressing than fear and anticipation.

I’m reminded of the one time a certain scary video top found me playing with his singletail on set and asked me to hit him. That was distressing, all right — to ME.

The welts multiplied. Now there were dark streaks, purpling in their centers. I took my satisfaction knowing that he was bound and determined to dislike it.

And then all too soon it was over. “Give me that,” he said. He pushed me up against the wall. Because I had dressed up for him, I cried black tears; they crept down my cheeks like cartoonist’s ink.

The next morning he pulled up his shirt in the mirror, and said, “Want to see the marks?”

I ran to the bathroom to see. There were still six or eight of them, where I had laid in the whip: livid red welts crossing his back. I kissed them. He laughed at me. Later, we had an impromptu picnic in Riverside Park, and I dug into cut fruit and rotisserie chicken with the gusto of someone who’d had a lot of sex.

“It’s such a shame you don’t actually switch,” I said, swallowing my piece of fresh mango.

“Why,” he asked, “do you want payback?”

“No,” I said wistfully, “because you look so good with your shirt off and whip marks on your back. It’s a loss to the dominant women of the world.”

*Via Figleaf. Hi again, Figleaf! Some days I think I should just mirror Figleaf’s blog and be done with this blogging thing entirely.

Posted in marks, switching, submission (or the lack thereof), tasty whips, masochism, dominance, dating, stereotypes, the lawyer